AI

Publishers are running into a wall with so-called native ads. Once seen as the panacea for declining digital ad rates, these ads that are designed to mimic editorial content have turned out to be costly to make and distribute and hard to scale, which makes them a tough sell with advertisers and also eats into publishers’ profit margins. The Washington Post is trying to solve the problem with artificial intelligence.

U.K. sports publisher GiveMeSport has used its proprietary technology to help grow its Facebook audience to an impressive 25 million followers. Now, it’s integrating artificial intelligence from its new owner, Breaking Data Corp., to give it an advantage over competitors.

Facebook says it is intensifying its efforts to control scams and fake news by taking a harder line on “cloaking,” a tactic that bad actors use across the web to avoid detection. “We’ve recently been ramping up our enforcement,” says Rob Leathern, Facebook product management director. “We are making it clear: We don’t tolerate cloaking.”

Is the growing adoption of artificial intelligence products by digital publishers a much-needed lifeline for a struggling industry, or the next deadly threat to its survival? Some worry that AI will eventually “take over” journalism, replacing skilled humans with soulless, data-scraping machines. But these three industry leaders are showing how innovative implementation of AI can free newsroom resources to focus on the vital journalistic tasks — like reporting and editing — that humans do best.

Among other things, Google unveiled new ways for its massive network of computers to identify images, as well as recommend, share, and organize photos. It also is launching an attempt to make its voice-controlled digital assistant more proactive and visual while expanding its audience to Apple’s iPhone, where it will try to outwit an older peer, Siri.

Futurist Amy Webb says the media’s next big disruption will be in voice — how we talk to machines and how machines talk to each other. Media companies don’t have a seat at the table where that infrastructure is being built, she says, and the missed opportunities because of that could be fatal.

A new capability in Nielsen Marketing Cloud, Nielsen Artificial Intelligence is designed to allow marketers to instantly act on changes in audience behavior that improve marketing relevance and results.